Tribute
by Nyah
Summary: Part One: You're asking for a favor but what you need is a shaman." Eric's thoughts when Sam requests help with the maenad and he requests Sookie Stackhouse in return. Part Two: Yatzee with the Queen. Eric, Sookie, Sam, Sophie Anne.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Characters etc belong to Alan Ball and Charlaine Harris  
**Note:** Written for pixiegiggles who asked what Eric was thinking when, in 2x11, he asks Sam to give him Sookie. This is the first of two parts. Beta work down by the one and only nycsnowbird.

**Tribute**

"He's at the bar," I almost say because Ginger's waiting in the parking lot an hour after sundown. This is not the first time she's let someone in who's insisted on seeing me. Far from it.

In some ways, Ginger is an ideal employee. She's a decent survivalist and can be counted on to bend to the will of the most dangerous person in a room. And if I am present, that is always me. She doesn't have a loyal bone in her body or synapse in her brain. But she is predictable. Which is a far more useful trait.

When she waits for me in the parking lot it's because her instincts have kicked in. The neutralized threat, the man waiting in the bar, is in the past. I am the threatening present and she steps up to ingratiate herself. So when she begins, "Please don't kill me, Eric ..." I almost finish the sentence for her. But then I catch the scents clinging to her—the beginnings of things.

"Children?"

"Yeah," she says, like the word's a gag she's spit out of her mouth. "And a guy who said he needed to see you. He's at the bar."

Another sniff tells me that he is a Shifter but not which one. One of the Shreveport pack maybe. Maybe not. Human life burns at the perfect temperature to sustain itself but Shifters burn too hot, constantly denaturing themselves so that even their scents boil over and burst. They are crude beings who dash madly between the poles of human and animal, creating friction. Heat is the least efficient form of energy. Maybe someone should tell them.

I pass through my office to enter the bar. The Shifter is facing the doors. Waiting.

I know immediately that there is a game afoot, and, following that metaphor, I know that the only way to beat the house is to count cards. No matter, I always keep the count in my head. And yet, here is Sam Merlotte, against the odds.

"There's a maenad in Bon Temps. I need your help to get rid of it."

I occupy the space opposite him, reclining, impressed enough to give pause. Sam Merlotte does not dress up his request in platitudes or try to appeal to my morality. He doesn't say we. He's here to make a deal and to take the responsibility for it.

A maenad? How very gauche. Merlotte describes it and the town that has fallen under its sway. It has not been around long by his account, but he seems to understand, at least in part, what it is—a power so primitive that it lacks the capacity to reign itself in. I could tell him what I know—that a maenad cannot be contained. To impose controls on it would be to create something out of nothing. Creating has never been we vampires' strong suit. Our trump is tearing down.

Sam Merlotte wants to bring death on a creature that is immortal by its own edict, a creature that derives power from destruction. He wants to bring death but, for once, I am the wrong person to ask. "You're asking for a favor but what you need is a shaman."

"A shaman?" Merlotte's voice is flat and I see my error. I weigh the deck and discern the hand he's been dealt. He may be here against my odds but his best odds lie with me. He figured this out for himself. Respectable, Merlotte.

"An oracle might do just as well."

"An ...? If you're going to waste my time, we'll just go." The Shifter's voice borders on a growl and he rises to leave, but he is not a fool, not entirely, and when he meets my eyes he finally understands that I am not toying with him. Nor am I wasting his time. He came to me after all. We're speaking on my dime.

He sits again and waits for me to illuminate the paths, to tell him which ones don't lead to ruin. He wants to walk in my shadow, visible because it's darker even than his present darkness. What he doesn't seem to understand is I have never been anyone's guide but my own. Still ... I can teach him something about the journey. For his logic, I will give him that much. "Why should I help you, shifter?" The shaman is not a philanthropist and the oracle is not a social worker.

Merlotte speaks of alliances, of strength in numbers. Tired adages. I am vampire, not a herd animal. I smile and offer the next lesson: You must buy the shaman's favor and buy it in the coin of his choosing. "Can you give me Sookie Stackhouse?"

Pam sighs for my benefit, so that I might know how little amusement she finds in this interaction, so that I know it is beneath me. But I have never been anyone's guide and my child has yet to learn this lesson. That I want the girl is irrelevant, that the Shifter wants her means everything.

Merlotte denies my request with horror.

"Well, that's a shame. That would be a tribute I would not soon forget." That he does not understand is unsurprising. My own understanding built over a thousand years and coalesced on a rooftop at dawn. "Please, Godric," I'd begged and been sent away because I wanted life more than I wanted him. It wasn't until then that I understood the shaman's price: sacrifice. You can have anything you want as long as you are willing to give up everything else to get it.

Merlotte reminds me that he is not here to offer tribute. He is here to reap the benefits without making the sacrifice. I erase his delusions that this might be an acceptable transaction.

And yet ... even if he was willing to offer the tribute, I am not a shaman. It is not in my power to call down the currents of mortality or persuade Thanatos to stay his hand. I am no one's guide but my own and though I am death, I have always chosen life.

I consider the situation. That I want the girl was irrelevant to the lesson but what I want is never irrelevant to me. The Shifter's request becomes an excuse I don't need, but an excuse nonetheless.

I tell the Shifter I will go see her. That I do not go for him does not occur to him.

I bid Merlotte and the children goodbye with a show of fang. It's an easy display that evokes delight from one child and fear from the other. That is the draw of human children: purity. They are too young to entertain the notion that they might be complex beings and too small to feel more than one thing at a time.

It is a fleeting pleasure, short as their innocence. I've already forgotten it by the time I'm above the skyline.

There are no shamans within convenient distance but an oracle might do just as well. And I at least understand that there will be a price. Now if only I can find someone else to pay it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** See part 1

**Note:** Beta by nycsnowbird

**Yahtzee**

When I enter the queen's summer home, she already has the dice out like she knows I've come for a divination.

"Our fourth has arrived!" My queen doesn't waste any time telling me that I am here on her terms. I may be a sheriff and twice her age anywhere else, but here I am the fourth and I am expected.

I sit down at the empty space at the table, at her feet, she is the queen after all, and this is how she holds court. "You know the rules, I'm sure," The queen says and rattles the dice in the cup. Once they would have been the bones and innards of a sacrificial bird.

"Another one!" says the pet with the blonde braids, and she's doing a well rehearsed rendition of wide-eyed wonder.

The queen is right. I do know the game. I've known it in many variations but the basic principle is always the same: roll the dice, if the outcome is not ideal, get rid of the parts you don't like and try again. I glance at the score sheet and see my name in the fourth column at the end of a list of penitents.

"We'll play to five million," the queen says, and her pet sullenly tells me she's way ahead. In case I've failed to notice.

The light in the room is disorienting. There is a thinness to artificial light like there is to mountain air. It presses uniformly into the corners of a room, trying to distract the senses, trying to fool them into believing it was born of clear skies and window panes. The queen's sense of irony is refined. The humans who attend us decorate themselves with skulls, they paint themselves up in the postures of death. She is their perfect reflection, dressed up in false silver and sunlight.

I look again at her human pet and feel something that is a step removed from pity. There is something broken in this one. She lives in a world that is governed by Sophie-Anne LeClerq's rules. She's burning on the fuel of blood lust. She is someone who's dedicated herself to burning out long before the consequences set in. And that's why she thrives. There's an end in sight and she's never expected to win. We play to five million and she's way ahead.

Poor child. Though it might be worse for her if she understood, the queen is from the Old World, from a time before accessible millions. Her rules reign here and here 'million' is still another word for infinite.

Pity is a step removed from sympathy.

Then the time is fortuitous and the oracle speaks: "Yahtzee is the most egalitarian game in the world! You could be my social, physical, or intellectual inferior, but your chances are equal to mine. It's the antidote for this world, where things such as superiority and inferiority do matter."

The trick is to listen to what the oracle says instead of what you'd like her to say.

"Speaking of which ...." She segues into a flippant remark about Godric but I listened to her words and how she turned them. Speaking of which. Godric was her superior in every way. I already knew this but her acknowledgment of the fact is fitting. Maybe even kind.

"Thank you," I reply even as she shouts, "Yahtzee!" because the oracle is not bound by time and we're already on to something else.

"It is a magic!" The human male declares. Here is an interesting specimen, a perfect example of what the human race might have become if consciousness hadn't hit evolution like a midlife crisis: strong, beautiful, and stupid. And yet, it often happens that only fools are granted leeway to speak the truth.

The leeway is small though. "I do not cheat!" the queen declares, and the boy backs away. His preservation instinct is intact at least. He's dared to threaten the validity of her world. But in her world she is sane, in any other world she is dangerous. In her world, it is perfectly acceptable that she should roll six perfect Yahtzees.

When the Queen gets around to the maenad, I know why she's given me an audience. She knows something I don't about Sookie Stackhouse. She wants to see how far the contamination's spread. She accuses me of loving the human, the human who accused me of loving Godric. Sookie knew nothing and yet ....

I look up at a window, at the sun that the queen has had painted on the sky and for an instant I let myself see my maker at dawn, see the fire burning him from the inside out. Maybe that's the solution to the problem of Sookie Stackhouse. Maybe she can answer the question of her existence. Maybe it's there inside her and the only thing to do is burn her up and divine meaning from the entrails.

But the queen dislodges my contemplation, asking about vampire blood. I toyed with Bill on the bridge because I was holding all the cards and he was still making threats. But here the cards don't mean a thing. We're playing dice and she heard it all.

The queen leaps through a crack in her own composure, and then my back is on the tile floor.

For five hundred years, time has smashed upon the queen like a breaking wave, taking pieces of her away with it on the tide. Godric's solution was death, the one thing he'd evolved beyond. Sophie-Anne's is insanity. It is the only thing that keeps her sane.

But then there was Bill-fucking-Compton knowing something she didn't tell him and telling her about it.

The queen doesn't like to be reminded that her sphere of absolute influence only goes as far as the front door. "I could own your fangs as earrings," she says, and I know it's true. Here she owns the ocean and the sun and the sky.

But I am distracted. There is blood in my mouth. The queen really does knows something I don't. I raise my head, seeking her lips but she pulls away. Maybe she's noticed how fixedly I'm looking into her eyes, how deliberately I'm not looking at her pet who looks and smells so much like Sookie, her pet that was so interested in Sookie's love life. I don't let realization reach my eyes where she might see it. But I know now that the queen warns from experience. Don't taste her. Ever.

She takes her seat, satisfied that I fear her and I want her. I've passed her test. Bill Compton wouldn't have kissed her back. He is in love and monogamous with his human.

I can still taste the pet's blood on the backs of my lips. The oracle has answered a question I didn't know I was asking and the path is clearer now. But it will all be for nothing if Sookie Stackhouse dies at the hand of the maenad.

I roll the dice again and plan my words.

She reads the dice quickly. Dice are absolute. There's none of the guesswork that goes along with entrails. "You suck at this!" Here she makes the rules. Here she assures herself that they are hers by breaking them.

"Your Majesty—"

"We'd like you to stay to break the first million. Then we'll celebrate." Stay for a single eternity and then we'll celebrate. This is the sacrifice she requires for answering my question—now I know Sookie Stackhouse is worth my efforts and now I am not allowed to save her life.

Just before dawn, the queen releases me. I walk out of her dayroom and fly into a world in the last throes of night. Ahead of me is Bon Temps and Sookie Stackhouse. Soon I will be close enough to know whether or not she lives, whether or not the price was too high.

Behind me is my queen and my name is at the bottom of a list of penitents. I walk away but I can still see the sun painted on the sky. I can still see Godric burning. I am still trapped in her perfect world. And as the oracle prophesied, I suck at playing by someone else's rules.


End file.
